Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday July 05, 2009 @11:26AM
from the or-food dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Using Netflix as a business model, Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra founded Chegg, shorthand for 'chicken and egg,' to gather books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. Chegg began renting books in 2007, before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Rashid's American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system. 'People thought we were crazy,' Rashid said. Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company's revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million, and this year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone."

The whole textbook market is a scam to rip off students. The vendors keep churning the book versions simply just to keep saturation low (why do we need 17 editions of an algebra book?).

At one point, I had purchased a marketing book only to find that a new version had come out right at the beginning of the semester. The prof apologized for the problem and handed out an addendum for the students with the early edition. The only changes were to the end-of-chapter quiz questions. And most of those questions remained the same - just with the question numbering changed slightly.

They weren't even trying to be creative with the fact that they were screwing the students. Everyone knew this to be the case and accepted it. I think that I was the only person who was upset by this obvious racket.

Is this what we should expect for everything from now on? If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks. These textbooks would cost nothing. Certainly, there would still be a need for private market textbooks (on arcane and/or rapidly changing subjects) but I can see a substantial portion of textbook requirements displaced by an open system.

If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks.

It doesn't work that way. We can't just simply "force" a product to exist. If it doesn't exist already, then that typically means there isn't a happy medium between the cost of providing such a service and the cost to the users of the service. That's the way that free market works; if it can be done, and people want it, then it usually is done. If it doesn't exist, especially if it is a service in high demand, like free knowledge, then it means that, most probably, it can't exist without massive subsidies, or slave labour.

If it doesn't exist, especially if it is a service in high demand, like free knowledge, then it means that, most probably, it can't exist without massive subsidies

That might be true of an actual free market, but we don't have a free market. Not in textbooks, and not in a lot of things.

For one thing, the existence of copyright already makes this a market in which the government has intervened and set rules. Besides that, schools often require that students use a specific edition of a specific textbook, so students aren't free to shop around for a better textbook product.

Given that the vendors of textbooks are completely dependent on schools to require specific textbooks, the schools absolutely can "force" a product to exist. Whatever requirements they put on textbooks in order to use them, those are the requirements that publishers will meet. They're already forcing a sort of product to exist as it is.

Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them, but there's no evidence that open source textbooks are impossible.

That was my first thought too - why not have open source textbooks? Solves the problem completely.

But then I remembered "teacher's editions".

Each textbook has a teacher's edition that has all the answers in it. Any open source book would logically have to have the same, if it as a product is to provide the same utility. And if it's available to the teacher, by the definition of open source it would be available to the students as well. Suddenly you'd see a lot of people getting 100% on their homework - they'd just copy it out of the teacher's edition.

I'm trying to figure out a way around this but I think that textbooks may be in that rare class of problems that open source and full disclosure doesn't solve.

If the teacher needs the answer handed to them they shouldn't be teaching the class. Forcing the teachers to read the textbook and solve the problems at least once will go a long way towards making sure there are no glaring errors in the text (or our teacher selection). And if the book is open source, then they can simply submit a patch and everybody benefits.

If the teacher needs the answer handed to them they shouldn't be teaching the class...

That might work for some subjects, but there are plenty out there that a teacher would appreciate a sanity check. Especially, the teachers who haven't taught the course before, or TA's that come up with solutions but aren't really that confident that they aren't 90% solutions.

My professors give zeros to people using the teacher's manual solution verbatim. Usually it is easy to spot since people format the solution the same way. I'm talking about engineering courses here so YMMV on gen. ed. courses. At least at my school this would not be a problem.

Each textbook has a teacher's edition that has all the answers in it. Any open source book would logically have to have the same, if it as a product is to provide the same utility.

You split it up in 2 books and then forbid the students to own the answering book. You can have a good time convincing a 6-year old that they shouldn't peek without figuring out themselves; it's the same with an 18-year old. They will have a hard time understanding that figuring things out by themselves is exactly what education

Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them...

How is this adding something? Did you notice in my post where I said:

Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them

The point is the textbook industry as it currently exists is already the product of an unfree market. The current realities of the textbook market are caused by those un-freedoms. If someone has it in their head to try to fix the situation, it isn't too sensible to complain against them on the basis of interference in "the free market".

Or to put it another way, you can say that you want a Ferrari for free, but no one is obligated to provide it to you.

There are lots of problems with this comparison. First, we're talking about textbooks and not Ferraris. Ferraris aren't necessary for the education of our youth and the betterment of society. Second, it's not a question of whether anyone in particular is obligated to provide textbooks, but whether schools and students should be obligated to pay exorbitant fees to textbook publishers.

Finally, the expense of Ferraris isn't generated by artificial scarcity created by copyright law. Ferraris are expensive, at least in part, due to the materials and labor to create each one. However, once a textbook is created, it could be copied indefinitely by anyone at practically no expense, if not for copyright law. Seeing as copyrights are an artificial right granted by society for the sake of the betterment of society, publishers using the copyright to the detriment of our education system seems to me to be an abuse.

Anyway, all of that isn't really the point. The point is, open source textbooks would be a boon for education, and I haven't yet heard a reason why it's unworkable. Even if it stops being a valid commercial venture to some extent, that may just be an issue of technology making an industry obsolete-- buggy whips and all.

Especially as many textbooks are written by professors now, and often almost totally for academic recognition (well, it's not for the money).

Editing Wikipedia (and I imagine, Wikibooks) feels like using Subversion. Slow, awkward, and my changes get accidentally overwritten by the next guy. Maybe once wikis are based on a better source-control model than the "one definitive master" and global-locking we'll get better books.

Both of the professor written textbooks I had in college were non profit for the professor (if not others), in one the prof set up a scholarship fund with the profits, and another the prof had waved his fee altogether (even making digital copies available for free) because he was sick of the practices described above. He actually had to circumvent the college rules in order to do that too. The 50% markup over B&N or Amazon is big money for the colleges, they didn't like him selling a 20 dollar book.

Not every professor would do it for free of course, but there would be more than enough.

You did forget to mention when the instructor requires that you buy HIS book as required reading for the class, regardless of what ego-fluffing crap he had written. Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field. I've gotten this both from the instructors and from the idiots who are churned out of various universities who glow over their degree, but can't handle simple functions of their chosen profession. How can you spend years studying something and not have a clue of what you're doing?

For IT work, I'd hire someone who spent 2 years exploring their chosen field at home or at a lower level job and can explain topics in detail, rather than a graduate of a 4 year institution with their warm fuzzy diploma and no clue of how to really do the work.

Honestly, I've hired both, and found it to be more than abundantly true. 2 years of tech school, 4 years of university, or the guy who's installed every distro available just to see how they work?

The self-trained explorer at home turned out to be the best. They'll be more willing to honestly tell me where their weaknesses are, so I can tutor them as problems happen, and they will learn. For example, one guy told me, "Well, I don't know sendmail that well." Fine. It was a webhosting gig, but I generally managed the mail servers. I'd send him notes on my changes, and he'd ask questions. It wasn't long before I'd get notes in saying "I made this change, for this reason" to a primary mail server, and the changes would be correct.

The 2 year tech school grads came in with resumes listing all of our technologies, and telling me they knew their stuff. It was all regular industry stuff. We didn't reinvent the wheel, we simply used the existing technologies to their fullest. I asked about Cisco, and they both said "I successfully passed the Cisco class, I know how to work our equipment". Great. I needed an IP and password set on a new switch, and installed in a DC. I was going to make the rest of the changes before it was really used. It sat on the bench for a week until the first told me "I don't know how." {sigh}. I gave it to the second, who did the same thing. What? If you aren't guided through it by an instructor, you have no clue of how to operate it? It wasn't urgent, but it didn't need to sit idle on the bench for 2 weeks. I never liked leaving equipment in the office, when it could be in the DC ready to use in a pinch. They were trained to pass the tests, not how to practically operate anything. They wasted 2 years of their lives, the tuition money, and two months of my office space.

I handed it off to a guy that said "Well, I never used it, but I'll try.". It took him about an hour, but he did it right and asked me questions on preconfiguring ports for me. Above and beyond. I like that. I didn't want the ports done, I had my own config to lay over it for that. I just needed to be able to access it from the office.:)

Now, when I get to a position where I'm hiring again, my same rules will apply. Great if you have a degree, but you'd better have the practical application of the required technology before I'll consider you. So, a guy sitting at home for 2 years messing with it will always have preference over a guy who sat at a university for 4 years, unless the university guy can also show me that he's had a couple years of hands-on work with it.

From your post I get the impression you're probably a product of an American applied IT/CS program. Everything I've heard suggests to me that particular system is particularly broken.

My undergrad and grad studies were aimed at preparing me for a research career. All of my professors were active researchers, except for one who was mostly retired, but was a nobel laureate (shall we count him as a "can do?"). In grad school, one of the things they liked to do was have a course coordinator (also an active re

Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field.

I don't buy this for a second, especially not for science & engineering professors. First, have you looked at how hard it is to get a professorship somewhere recently? It's almost certainly a lot more competitive than your typical industry job. Second, you don't put yourself through a Ph.D. program unless you want to do research (or perhaps if you want to teach at a non-research institution), s

open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks. These textbooks would cost nothing.

This is one of those few times when the mod system has failed. We already have a free, open source, modifiable text for every topic. It's called Wikipedia and it's the living embodiment of why we have professional, accountable, paid editors for text books. Editions can be viewed as a scam, or they can be viewed as the one tool professional publishers have to continue to generate mone

If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks. These textbooks would cost nothing. Certainly, there would still be a need for private market textbooks (on arcane and/or rapidly changing subjects) but I can see a substantial portion of textbook requirements displaced by an open system.

The "mandatory" part doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't force authors to write books for free. And although a lot of free textbooks do exist already (see my sig), you can't guarantee that for a particular subject, the best book will always be a free book rather than a non-free.

But other than that, what you're suggesting seems similar to something California is doing now. Motivated by the California state budget crisis, Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a Free Digital Textbook Initiative [clrn.org],
which has gathered a list of free, online high school math and science textbooks that are aligned with state content standards.
The intention is to have the books used in classrooms in fall 2009.
This [arstechnica.com] article has some
useful background, but it mistakenly suggests that the arduous state adoption process will be an obstacle to the FDTI; statewide adoption
only applies to K-8, but FDTI is doing high-school books.
There was a previous, unsuccessful
effort called COSTP [opensourcetext.org], which tried to produce a history textbook using
Wikibooks [wikibooks.org]. Here [bbc.co.uk]
is a BBC article about the present effort, and here [mercurynews.com] is a newspaper opinion piece
by the Governor. This [ca.gov] is a transcript of a speech by the Governor, with some interesting Q&A
at the end.
Twenty books were submitted (press release [ca.gov],
links [edublogs.org]).
The four books from traditional publisher Pearson are consumable workbooks, not actual textbooks.

"Open source" isn't such a good idea, because you'd like a little more reliability in your text books than, for instance Wikipedia.

*facepalm*

Open source != Wiki.

Just because anyone can submit a patch to the Linux kernel, doesn't mean it has to be accepted. Just because anyone can fork the Linux kernel, doesn't make the new one official.

All this would mean is a creative commons license, so that no one entity can have a monopoly on all future versions of a given textbook, and so that people can fork when needed -- for example, a professor might want their own edition...

Also if they want to ask "We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?" then why not also have public libraries of movies, as its worked for hundreds of years for books. The libraries buy the books and our taxes pay for the libraries so they can buy movies (and music) the same way. After all books don't earn their living from libraries as books are still also sold to fans of the books, so its not as if libraries are the only source of income for books.

The last time I checked Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, it had collections of movies on VHS and DVD for lending.

Music especially doesn't cost so much more to produce that a book

It's also much easier to copy ever since home taping. Unlike tape decks, photocopiers made by Xerox can't just copy an entire book by the user mounting the source and destination media and pushing Start.

And half the movies and CDs we take home are scratched enough that they skip quite a bit. Of course the books aren't in great condition either, but due to the fact that the data density is so much smaller, a scratch doesn't seem to cause any problems in readability. I wonder what the legal ramifications of lending out a copy of the original CD/DVD from the library, so that they can make another copy to lend when the first becomes unreadable?

Also if they want to ask "We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?" then why not also have public libraries of movies, as its worked for hundreds of years for books. The libraries buy the books and our taxes pay for the libraries so they can buy movies (and music) the same way. After all books don't earn their living from libraries as books are still also sold to fans of the books, so its not as if libraries are the only source of income for books.

This is already being done. Our local library has a large selection of VHS and DVD movies available for signing out, along with an even larger selection of CDs. And these aren't just ancient, crappy releases either, around half of the items are current releases.

I have to teach out of one edition or another. Different editions can have different material, or can have it in different places. I have to test. When I have 4 classes with 200+ students, half of them online (as I have recently), I have to automate the process in order to give grades and feedback in a timely manner. To do that I have to test on one edition, rather than trying to develop tests for several. I spend a great deal of time developing additional instructional material just for the one edition and don;t have time to keep developing tests.

I tell my students that I don't care what edition they use, or indeed if they don't own a book at all. But they are responsible for covering the material in the chosen edition because that's what is tested in content and arrangement. A few take me up on it. Some manage to get an A (though not a perfect score) with a 'wrong' edition if they pay close attention to what's covered rather than just chapter numbers. Some gang up with others and compare books so they can copy the different material for each others' use. Most don't attempt this and go for the chosen edition. I'd make it easier on them all and teach from an older edition, but most sources don't redistribute older editions -- they often don't even buy them back. This one source might help in that respect, but it'll take many doing the same and doing it with older editions to make it possible for me to choose, teach and test from an older one.

Why can't you support editions that you have prepared for in the past? Because it takes more effort?

Good question. There's more than one reason.

Working from an edition that doesn't have some of the material leaves those students out of discussion. The best intentioned of them comes unprepared. Our time and their money mean too much for me to waste it with me reading the missing parts to them. If I did do it for those with some parts missing, why not for all?

For online students, I have so far only been allowed to provide one test bank to be incorporated into any class. It can put together as many different versions of the test that it wants to from that bank, but only from that bank. The test bank comes with a given edition of the book. I can add questions as much as I like, but they'll only go into that one test bank, and I can tell it to pull them up at random, but not according to who has what book. This is, of course, an artifact of using publisher's materials and geared towards keeping them all using the most recent. Note too that the distance learning stuff is done via software designed for that, like Blackboard, and is administered by a distance learning component of the university IT. Neither of us can alter the software. Were I even allowed to design, write and administer my own software for distance learning that would be another half to full time job piled on top of what's covered next.

For a more direct answer, yes. It takes more effort, and therefore time. Typically I'm expected to do a full time job of teaching plus incidentals (committees, counseling, etc.), in addition part to full time work in research and related professional incidentals (presentations, manuscript reviewing, etc.). That's 1.5 to 2 jobs worth of stuff. The former gets arranged in time according to the whims of the university scheduling system, committee chairs' ability to schedule as conveniently as possibly (hopefully for others rather than themselves) and so forth. The latter has to get fit in around the former, despite the fact that it is difficult if not impossible to carve some of those things up to fit (ie. if I'm running a subject in an experiment and they run over time, do I trash the data for that run, or do I make my students wait?). And I have to do these two jobs without burning out and so making myself less able to do either of them as well as I should. Luckily I love the work and my field so much that I don't miss not having much life outside. I am, after all, a professional -- that is, this is what I profess to be, rather than just something I do. As such I try to work with my students as much as possible. That's why I let them choose what version to use. But they have to work with me too. There's two factors, flexibility for them, ease of administration for me, to consider. I ask they meet me half way, and I try to help them do so.

I have done one rather outlandish thing in trying to make things fair to all and leaving room for other editions and such, while requiring enough to satisfy the regulations. I give both on site and distance classes the same test, comprised of the entire test bank, typically 150-300 multiple choice questions. In the name of wanting to find out what it is they've learned, rather than what they haven't, they are allowed to answer whatever questions they wish. They can answer up to 50 questions and get 2 points for each right answer. If they answer wrong they lose half a point, making it against their interest to guess; they'd do better answering fewer. The ones they don't answer don't count. It works well for them. Not so much for me. Both dot readers and automated testing software such as comes with Blackboard don't allow for a difference between 'no answer given' and 'wrong', so I have to grade them all by hand on paper using a printed test key. This typically takes an entire weekend (12 to 24 hours work), four times a semester. I think that's plenty fair for my part of meeting them halfway, and is more than sufficient response to the question of "too much effort".

In all reality, how is this all that different from a student buying a textbook at the start of a semester and selling it back at the end? I also think that the endless cycle of "new" editions of the book can put a crimp in the plans for this service, since schools will require the latest edition of a book, which will be impossible for this company to find cheaply online, meaning that they'll need to price to rental to pay for the full cost of the book in just a few semesters (before the new one comes out).

Interesting idea, but I'm skeptical as to how well they can keep costs low enough to be a truly economical alternative to buying.

At DIKU they will often try to tell you how the newest version maps to the old one, but in the end most students end up just buying the new book rather than trying to keep up, often having to jump back and forth in the book.

When I was in school it was "Here are the homework assignments, they're only in the new version of the textbook". I'm not saying it's in any remote way logical, just that's what they do.

I assume you're talking about the college level.

It's logical alright, it's just ugly. Much of the time, that professor is the person who wrote the textbook. The one they make mandatory for their class. The one they will sell to you, for the low, low price of several times the production costs.

Sometimes what they teach is quite different from what they claim to teach. Yeah the syllabus might talk about physics, or English. The subject taught might be more like "Ok class, for today's lesson I will

Don't make the mistake of assuming that textbook authors get much money from the sales. They don't. If your professors are assigning you their own books, they may be getting a bit of an ego boost, but they're not doing it for financial reasons. (And more likely, it's for the good and sufficient reason that they know the textbook will be in accord with their lesson plans.) The publishers are the ones who make almost all the money from textbook sales, and they're the ones who are constantly pushing new ed

Don't make the mistake of assuming that textbook authors get much money from the sales. They don't. If your professors are assigning you their own books, they may be getting a bit of an ego boost, but they're not doing it for financial reasons. (And more likely, it's for the good and sufficient reason that they know the textbook will be in accord with their lesson plans.) The publishers are the ones who make almost all the money from textbook sales, and they're the ones who are constantly pushing new editions for that reason.

That's not unlike the situation with recording artists and the average record label. Still, I've yet to hear of a band that said "nah, don't promote our music, we want to be unknown and unheard-of." Also, you say "bit of ego boost" as though it were a footnote when it was the very point of what I was saying. What do you think the money represents for a lot of these folks? There are some notable exceptions but speaking generally, professors are not known for their meekness.

Ego can be measured in non-monetary terms; nobody goes into academia to get rich, and those who tie their egos directly to their paychecks find other, more lucrative careers. In academia, the real currency is publication, and on that scale journal articles count for much more than textbooks do. (Whether this makes sense or not is another debate entirely.) As for "professors are not known for their meekness," this is true, but it's also true that the most egotistical faculty are those who don't want to te

Much of the time, that professor is the person who wrote the textbook. The one they make mandatory for their class. The one they will sell to you, for the low, low price of several times the production costs.

I have only had this happen once. The book was recommended not mandatory and the professor had arranged for my department to sell it for Â£7

Very true. When you count the costs of tuition, food, lodging, clothing, transporation, and all the other expenses of going to university, I would say that the cost of books make very little difference as to the overall cost of the schooling. And most of the students are wasting tons of money on cafeteria food and alcohol, and yet still think they have the right to complain that text books are too expensive.

In other words, the old "Disney vault" trick. Is there a reason why professors haven't led the way in switching to textbooks published as free [freedomdefined.org] cultural [creativecommons.org] works [educause.edu]?

Wikibooks is a good example for anything that has a featured book. But a lot of books I see there, like the one on digital signal processing, are full of "25% done" modules. About how much of a typical undergraduate engineering or arts curriculum can WB featured books serve?

the same way programs require you have service pack 1, or service pack 2 etc. The course material was built around a particular version.

If the student needs to buy a book, there's no reason to not recommend the newest version. New versions exist for a reason, error correction, new information, change in focus etc. all go into making new editions.

Other reasons:The professor only has the new version. Profs get textbooks for free, usually many more than they will actually use, but publishers only send alon

Not if the program of study [wikipedia.org] you're looking for isn't available at other schools, or the body which regulates the profession you're looking to enter [peo.on.ca] (which also legally controls the use of the title of your profession) requires successful completion of a degree in an "accredited institution of learning," where accredited means is on a list that they maintain. That narrows your choices somewhat; add in the fact that moving to another school outside of your country includes the cost of moving, living away from

You think engineering texts are expensive? You should see medical texts. And they got the same racket going with having a professional organization, that requires you graduate from an accredited institution. They also require that you go to school for like 7 years, not just a measly 4 years. If you don make it through systems engineering, and get your P. Eng. you most likely will be making enough money that the cost of the text books will seem like it was all worth it in the end.

<quote>In all reality, how is this all that different from a student buying a textbook at the start of a semester and selling it back at the end? I also think that the endless cycle of "new" editions of the book can put a crimp in the plans for this service, since schools will require the latest edition of a book, which will be impossible for this company to find cheaply online, meaning that they'll need to price to rental to pay for the full cost of the book in just a few semesters (before the new o

Did you really have professors that required the newest books? Maybe my department (chemistry major) was a little different, but they didn't care. The semester usually started off with "here is the current book. If you don't have this one don't worry about it, just make copies of what you need." The same went for my math classes.

Did you really have professors that required the newest books? Maybe my department (chemistry major) was a little different, but they didn't care. The semester usually started off with "here is the current book. If you don't have this one don't worry about it, just make copies of what you need." The same went for my math classes.

The problem is mainly with the professors who write the textbook for their own class, thus are the copyright holder, and make minor changes here and there (moving a keyword to another paragraph, swapping the titles of sections, renaming sections) so that an older book would cause more confusion as it didn't match up with the course work exactly.If you question them on this, they say it is your own fault for not having the newest $160 copy of the book.

The margin between the buyback price and the resell price is huge with textbook stores on campus. I noticed this during my college career and started building a site that would facilitate peer-to-peer reselling without the middleman. Since the margin was so large, it would be very easy for me to undercut the textbook stores and still make a large profit.

Alas, it was eventually filed under my 'future ideas' folder along with 20 others and I was distracted by other things... like women and beer...

If implemented right - it saves first and foremost HUUUUGE amounts of time. Usually also money - while you could resale/etc. books yourself, there will also be those editions you have hard time reselling...

Yes, the cause of the second problem are schools requiring latest editions. I can see the point in college/etc. level education (though even there only with some portion of books), but there's really not much point in highschool level education.

I used to love Chegg. It started out working as essentially an online classified geared towards books, and since it started at Iowa State, the school I go to, there were plenty of people using it, and it wound up being a very good deal, taking the cost of books per semester down to almost nothing (except of course when they switched editions every few years).

Now that they're pushing their rental service so hard, it's a lot harder to save as much money. I couldn't find any of my books used last semester, w

Because you buy it for $80 and sell it back for $5? It may as well be a rental, without all the hassle of trying to sell it back.
Of course, in my dorm we'd just resell the books to other folks who were going to need them next semester. Buy for $80 new and resell to them for, say, $40. They get a good deal, and so did we.

In all, compared to purchasing directly from the bookstore, I probably saved $500. As compared to buying online, I saved about $200.

See, at my university I didn't need to buy any textbooks, as there was a library, and there were loads of copies of all the recommended books. Also, the lecturers never set coursework from books, they handed out sheets of paper with the questions on (or more usually said "see my website").

I did buy one book as I thought it was interesting. It's currently for sale on Amazon.co.uk for £45 (the "international edition"), but Amazon.com lists it for $95.

1. Student pay ridiculous prices for half-useful photo-laden authoritative textbooks, only to sell them back to the publisher-run book resale cartels for 10% of the price they paid.

2. With the current trend of Big Copyright, every written work must have an owner/copyright holder. Therefore, you do not own the books you have copies of.

I own my experience of the book, or the movie, and put forward that those experiences, being mine, grant me ownership of the work as my experience as much as the money I paid for the 400 pages of paper and ink.

We will look back to the beginning of the 21st Century and laugh at this Information Prohibition.

We will look back to the beginning of the 21st Century and laugh at this Information Prohibition.

You mean just like we look now at drug/substance prohibition? The way we learned our lesson that it's never going to work no matter how hard we try because the very idea represents a total failure to comprehend the situation? The way it's a hypocritical position which has done a great deal of harm in the name of justice? I'm glad nothing like that goes on today... Oh.

Frankly, I think the police couldn't care less. They're just as brainwashed as everyone else, but in a hypothetical situation, where an informed and rational adult consumes drugs responsibly, what would they care? What would anyone care?

What people are scared of is the abuse. And someone made them believe that every drug user will abuse the drug and become a liability to society. And THAT is the crux of the matter.

It's the same thing with a lot of other 'problems'. Guns come to mind or people with unusual sexual tendencies. Somehow, the first thing people think about is 'Oh God, what if someone MAKES me participate? What if I become the VICTIM!!!11!!!'. It happened with homosexuals, it's happening now with pedophiles and private gun owners.

I mean most police officers don't do the job for the cash, as far as I'm informed, they don't make much money. Wouldn't you agree that they'd rather go after those who hurt and kill other people, rather than those who've been made into bogeymen?

I mean most police officers don't do the job for the cash, as far as I'm informed, they don't make much money. Wouldn't you agree that they'd rather go after those who hurt and kill other people, rather than those who've been made into bogeymen?

They don't care, as long as they get to exercise authority over someone. Preferably being able to hit them a few times. A dream day they get to shoot someone.

I bet some of them....most in fact, think they're doing a useful if thankless job of protecting society. Most of the ones I've known were pretty good people. The exceptions tend to stand out because of how much power they can wield abusively. They are, however, exceptions. To vilify an entire group of people because of the handful that are rotten is ridiculous.

I bet some of them....most in fact, think they're doing a useful if thankless job of protecting society. Most of the ones I've known were pretty good people. The exceptions tend to stand out because of how much power they can wield abusively. They are, however, exceptions. To vilify an entire group of people because of the handful that are rotten is ridiculous.

No, there is one good reason why they are all painted with such a very broad brush.

A minority of them, probably a very small minority, are corrupt and do wield their power abusively. Then all of the rest pretend like they don't know that this goes on and refuse to do anything about it. I think they call that the "blue wall of silence." Those who don't stand up and try to do something about their corrupt coworkers are also part of the problem, in fact I don't know which is worse.

Oh, and I think the parent poster's whole statement is a rather brave assumption. The kids I know can pretty easily decide whether they like a certain situation or not.

Personally, I think there is only a crime if there is a victim. A child knows when something is uncomfortable or/and painful, wouldn't you agree? So let's assume a child does have sexual contact with an adult, yet does not feel the situation was a bad one.

Under that hypothetical scenario, where is the victim? Is it important to make the child feel bad about the situation after the fact? Why? Because society deemed the act bad? Why did it do so? We know the Romans were pretty laid back about such things, so obviously that worked out for them, didn't it?

I was under the... uh... delusion that we try to protect the children from harm. This whole witch-hunt for supposed paedophiles feels a lot like pushing a situation into a preconceived mould that we deemed harmful and are therefore no longer willing to allow for those situations to be anything but.

And before you people explode and jump me like starved vultures a carcass, I have had contact with people who have had sexual relations with adults while they were kids and actually have fond memories of those encounters. There is thus evidence that such encounters can be positive. So how is it we're all so single-minded about this matter?

Libraries anyone?
During my 2nd year at uni (I didn't think of it for my first) I just got all the text books I needed from the library. Most of them were 4 week loans and could be renewed on the internet - so it wasn't really that much of a hassle.

College textbooks have limited re-use because the publishers make new editions strictly of the purpose of obsoleting them so people don't buy used books and are forced (or at least encouraged) to buy new ones instead.

Renting something that only can be used 2-3 times means you end up paying a LOT to rent it. If the company who rents it is to make a profit, they have to charge a significant fraction of the price of the item to rent it.

For example, in the article, $69 (including shipping) to rent a book that retails for $123. You can probably find it used for $85 and sell it again when you are done (for peanuts).

Renting something that only can be used 2-3 times means you end up paying a LOT to rent it. If the company who rents it is to make a profit, they have to charge a significant fraction of the price of the item to rent it.

Reading the above reminds of a story I saw covered on TV not too long ago.

I don't recall the exact details or the name of the company (maybe someone can chime in), but some enterprising individual decided to set up a Craigslist type of service where individuals who owned "stuff" could rent t

This is a business model that will be specifically forbidden with electronic books. And enforced by encryption or proprietary formats (which are, in a practical sense, the same thing), which in turn are protected by the DMCA.

To an economist, or public policy maker, that makes the new technology stand out like a sore thumb as not an improvement on the old.

This is an example that has been lost in other media as the new format offers many benefits over the old - the ability to have a movie at home at ALL, the ability to copy music easily and with no lost fidelity. But about all that electronic books give you over the old is a reduction in volume and weight (search capability, much overrated - books always had indexes and tables-of-contents, and besides, you're supposed to be learning the whole textbook).

The new media have only a few generations of history, most of it with shifting technologies - copying music at all was not possible for the general public until the cassette recorder in 1968.

But with electronic books, book rental couldn't exist, used book stores couldn't exist, and believe me, they'll be gunning for libraries themselves.

The dramatic contrast with centuries of tradition about how society does business with books might finally get it through politician's heads that enabling new, more restrictive copyrights is robbing the public.

With electronic textbooks, this model won't exist because publishers prefer selling subscriptions allowing access to their entire catalogue, rather than individual texts. They'd rather the institution buys one of the expensive subscriptions, which allows unlimited downloads of any eBooks. The value comes from a continual supply of new books being made available to subscribers, not from individual book sales.

I alarmingly disagree, I've found countless books via google search via google books, try doing THAT in a library, really fucking time consuming. Anyone who thinks e-books are not a godsend in many ways (easier to copy, edit, update, etc) over dead-tree have not thought about it hard enough.

Wikibooks is a great example of the limitations of traditional books. Try mass collaboration on deadtree, going to be a lot less efficient.

search capability, much overrated - books always had indexes and tables-of-contents, and besides, you're supposed to be learning the whole textbook).

I have to disagree with this. Tables of contents only cover general topics, and indexes cover only a few hundred terms (an exhaustive index is by definition as long as the book itself). But what if you're interested in looking back at something you saw once and don't remember clearly? What if you're looking for an exact, specific formula, statistic or quote? And this all ignores, of course, that electronic search takes 3 seconds and gets you exactly where the searched term is, but with paper books it takes

OK France is 1/5 of the size of the US so maybe it cannot be compared, but I know only France as education system. In the primary/secondary we got the book loaned and had only to pay up a fine if we scribled it or worsened its state. From high school (lycee) and especially university there were old book sold from student to the previous. Some shop even speciliazed into doing that (Gibert Jeune for example in Paris is where I got my expensive QM books...). Only around 1 year out of 4 to 6 years we had to buy new one because change in the programs. But all in one it came relatively cheap. And in case you are asking, that was 25 years ago.

In Australia, we were encouraged to buy textbooks in highschool and uni but not overly penalised if we bought second-hand. Assignment questions were handed out separately and not those from the book; the ones in the book we'd use during classes to revise with.

I'm very glad not to have had American university lecturers, from the sound of things.

The college where I studied in India has a similar system. There is a college managed "Book Bank" which cost some two dollars per semester and allowed me to rent 5 books per semester. There was no guarantee of getting a recent edition of any book, but that was okay because the new content could be photocopied from someone in the hostel. The whole thing sort of worked, and of cousre the part I am forgetting to say is that it was funded by government aid.

I don't really understand the American textbook system. Here in the UK, there are rarely any compulsory textbooks for any university lectures. The lecturer will present the material you need to know, and if you pay attention you will pass. If you want to do well, typically you are expected to read some things outside the lecture, but this can be from library books or other sources. There are typically a few recommended books for each module, and reading any one of these will benefit you. Lecturers prov

What count is (if I understood correctly) that you have one program per state. So on state level the size argument don't hold at all. What COULD be the biggest problem is 1) new edition every year and 2) state/school force use of the new edition instead of skipping once every 4 or 6 years. After all at ground school and at high school level, it ain't as if basic math, physic, reading, biology, history and geography were changing that much. Naturally if school let themselves get caught replacing book every y

It doesn't matter how you slice it, the text book industry wants to get their $150/book/semester out of you. They don't really care how they get their income, as long as they get it. They'll either do it by making you buy a new book, which you can keep, or by charging you the same amount for a book that you can rent for the same amount of money, only now you have to turn it in when you're done, instead of having the option to keep it or sell it again.

When I was in college, during the Cretaceous period, we shared textbooks within our study groups. We then sold them to the next semester's students, if possible. Pissed off many published professors and the school bookstore.

Of course, back then, they were fragile clay tablets. Highlighting was a bitch.

Though I finished school a couple years ago getting books anywhere besides the two authorized campus book stores was a huge hassle.
First they were the only places that could find out what books are needed for classes. Second they didn't include the ISBN numbers in the print out. Third they wouldn't let you know what books were needed for what class until about a week before classes started. So basically if you wanted to buy your books somewhere else you need to print out a sheet w/ all the books needed

Give every child a netbook at their first school day, and let the textbook companies create a website. Then reproduction is practically free.I bet the whole netbook, the monthly rate that pays the texbook company people of your choice (or rather of the choice of the school you chose), and the WLAN will still cost less then a tenth of the price of the textbooks, over the whole school time.

Then, some people invest into paying people to extend free textbooks (eg. wikibooks, but with more background checks),bas

I would not want to rent my books, because I want to keep them for reference in the career that they are supposedly providing us! I mean, how are you going to remember EVERYTHING in those books beyond a semester or two after the class, let alone when you actually need it out in the professional world? I think the only books I sold back were for some of my freshman level stuff like anicent history, sociology, etc. I kept all the rest of my engineering books and even some other books I found interesting, like my American Literature anthology books.
Plus they look really good on my shelf at work;)

Everyone wants to save money on textbooks. We get it! However, when you really think about it what we really need is textbooks we're going to keep. The mentality of everyone from the publishers to the students (government, schools and book stores) needs to change. Textbooks should have lasting value. They should be an integral part of education and something a person would refer back to in their career. I wouldn't mind spending money on books if that were the case.
Renting textbook or selling them back or trying to artificially cheapen them in some way only compounds the problem. Let's fix the root of the problem for once instead mending it with stupid schemes.

I was apparently one of the lucky few to never have to worry about this issue. My university (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville [siue.edu], not too far from St. Louis) rented out texts themselves. I knew we were in the minority but I was actually shocked to not see any other posters state their universities did the same. Each semester the weekend prior to the first week of classes I would stop by the Textbook Services building, print out a list of text books and search the aisles for whatever was on the lis

As others have pointed out, textbooks are quite the scam, with minor editions being updated to require purchase of new books each year.

No one wants to take the chance that they're answering the wrong question on an assignment, or missing a factoid that is asked on a test, that happened not to be in their edition.

For some subjects, evolving of the texts makes sense; for some established fundamentals, it's senseless.

What would be interesting would be for some website to track differences between editions, to let students know where they stand; it would really call out the perpetrators of this "edition scam" and reduce their power greatly.

Alternatively, I wouldn't be surprised to see a trend towards copying/pdf'ing (i.e. piracy) of texts to save money for students. Piracy often crops up in cases where there is inappropriately high pricing (most computer games, IMHO); I can't see an area more ripe for piracy than the textbook industry. (Not that I'd condone it, just that I think the prices are inflated, and the requirements for new texts are artificially and inappropriately imposed.)

One thing that always seemed odd to me was that each year, in each course, the professors seemed surprised (or feigned surprise) at how expensive the book actually was, and indicated they wouldn't have chosen it had they known how expensive it was. Are their kickbacks or something?!?!? (I taught one year, and was given a big armload of texts to examine and choose between; I wasn't told prices, and simply picked the best one based upon its merit. So if there was a kickback scam, no one approached me; thankfully, for their sake:)

The online material for textbooks is how the textbook publishers assassinated the second-hand market. The one-time-use codes for Mastering Chemistry/Mastering Calculus/Mastering Physics/whatever are the biggest racket these criminals could have added to their already-a-racket.